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Instagram Founders Were Helped by Bay Area Connections — SAN FRANCISCO — Past midnight, in a dimly lighted warehouse jutting into the San Francisco Bay, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger introduced something they had been working on for weeks: a photo-sharing iPhone application called Instagram.

Twitter Wanted to Buy Instagram, But Facebook Beat it to it — Facebook may have secured the $1 billion acquisition of Instagram last week but it appears it wasn't the only social network that was interested in the service, with a recent New York Times report suggesting that Twitter was also in the running.

Google's evil stock split — Count me in with Robert Cyran: there's something a little evil about the way that Google is splitting its stock, and in so doing creating a whole new class of non-voting shares. — There's a long history of such things: they were outlawed in the 1920s …

Apple releases Flashback removal tool — Coming on the heels of its Thursday Java update, Apple has released a separate program to remove the so-called Flashback trojan that has affected over 600,000 Macs worldwide. — Apple on Friday released version 1.0 of its “Flashback malware removal tool” …

Silicon Valley's Secret, Vicious Lust for Hollywood Fame — Motivations are supposed to be pure in Silicon Valley. Facebook, for example, was developed to make the world a better place; its billions of dollars in revenue are just a happy accident. And when a Facebook scion eagerly promoted …

Scientists Build First Working Quantum Network — Scientists at the Quantum Dynamics division of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ) in Garching, Germany announced Wednesday that they have built the very first, elementary quantum network comprised of a pair of entangled atoms …

Netflix To Open Source Army of Cloud Monkeys — Netflix is getting ready to unleash its Simian Army. — The online movie rental company uses a troupe of cloud software — it calls the programs “monkeys” — that poke and prod its online applications and keeps the web site and its services humming along.